Harry Widman, one of Oregon's great painters, with his wife, Mardy, in his studio. Motoya Nakamura/The Oregonian

Harry Widman is not painting, he's sweeping. Broom in hand, he drags debris into piles on the floor of his studio. Light from a pale winter afternoon falls on his white head. His measured gestures entirely occupy him.

Mardy Widman, 71, looks affectionately at her husband, who is slowly disappearing behind the veil of Alzheimer's. She knows they will soon have an art show of their combined works. She also knows Harry isn't aware of the show.

Harry, 83, is one of Oregon's great painters, a modernist of bold human forms, influential, gregarious, gentlemanly, an admired teacher whose words of advice could change a student's career.

About the gallery: For 25 years, owners Laura Ross-Paul, the noted Portland painter, and her husband, Alex, have collected 340 Northwest pieces of art. The collection, in the Beaverton retirement center, includes some of the region's top artists: Lucinda Parker, George Johanson, Rick Bartow, Robert Rauschenberg, Louis Bunce and Manuel Izquierdo.

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But now Harry has put his brushes down. He has not painted on canvas for five years. Before he slips further away, Harry and Mardy are showing their work in the Golden Gallery at Beaverton Lodge, a retirement center owned by noted Portland painter Laura Ross-Paul and her husband, Alex. It is the first time Mardy has exhibited her work alongside her husband and former teacher in 25 years of marriage.

When Mardy asked him about the exhibit a few days before the Jan. 6 opening, he said, "I had no idea. Perhaps we should go look at the space." When she told him the gallery director was already hanging the show, he said, "Well then, I guess we better go see what it looks like."

Mardy is not sad Harry doesn't know of the show, she says.

"He will enjoy the experience of the opening. He will like seeing the work up and will love talking to friends. The show will be new each time we go see it. It is just the way it is. He is in the moment."

The pieces Harry will see with new eyes each time are his smaller works on paper from the late 1990s and early 2000s. Mardy will show mixed-media work in vibrant-colored plaster and paint with images based in nature and memory.

Sweeping the floor is one way Harry now lives in the moment, says Mardy, a vibrant, outgoing woman not shy talking about her husband's condition.

Today, the disease's progression has moderated, she says, partly, she believes, because she tries to lessen stress in his life. "He is actually more functional than during the early years. He is not in denial and no longer angry."

After he wandered into a neighbor's house in September, Mardy faced a choice: Put a device on him -- she found out it was the kind used to track caribou -- or build a fence around their property off Northwest Cornell Road.

She chose the fence.

In case he still wandered, she also gave neighbors a card describing him: "artist/philosopher gentleman, memory-impaired."

The "journeying spirit"

Harry, who grew up in New Jersey in the 1930s and '40s, always embodied paradox, art historian Roger Hull wrote in a monograph accompanying one of Widman's last solo shows, at the Ford Museum in 2009. He was an athlete who played football, basketball and baseball, and also drew and painted, wrote poems and read widely. As a painter, he "invented an abstract visual language of metaphor and meaning," not from Pacific Northwest roots but from New York modernism. His fluid, floating faces and bodies embrace both abstract expressionism and more structured, fanciful composition suggestive of Paul Klee, Hull wrote.

Or, as Harry once said, "I am interested in the images that are not quite recognizable, expressive images that are insistent even as they exist just beyond memory."

"He was one of the gods," says Ross-Paul, who met him when he showed at the influential Fountain Gallery in the 1970s. "He was on a par with (sculptor) Mel Katz or (painter) Jay Backstrand. He represented the perfect balance an art career could offer: a teaching gig and a thriving exhibit schedule."

Showing Harry's and Mardy's work together means a lot to Ross-Paul, the painter says.

"You look at their work, the organization of form and colors, obviously, his work has stimulated her. The life they've put together, it's just this beautiful love story. She is a real saint and hero how she supports him."

Artist Harry Widman copes with Alzheimer'sArtists Harry and Mardy Widman (husband and wife) talk about their life after Harry was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2005. Harry and Mardy have a show together at Golden Gallery in Beaverton, Oregon (January 6 - February 28, 2013).

Since his diagnosis, Harry has been "less obsessive" about getting into his studio, Mardy says. "In some ways, he is less into his own interior mind, more open to social interaction. He hasn't lost his vocabulary and still launches into teacher mode when asked about art. He has not lost his capacity to enjoy and we continue to have fun."

"Time does not matter"

For Mardy, a German Minnesotan used to being quick and decisive, that means learning to live in the moment with Harry, letting go of schedules and the clock. "We don't know what time it is. We go to a movie and it could be within half an hour of when it began or ended."

"It's a pretty good way to live," she says. "Grocery shopping takes us so long. So what? I don't have to hurry. Time does not matter."

Mardy calls Harry's recent work "environmental." He collects leaves, sticks and rocks in the yard and arranges them outdoors or on his studio walls.

"He searches for odd colors, signs of deterioration, unusual relationships of natural and inorganic shapes and color. He binds and wraps unrelated things. It may be a way of organizing or controlling things, but they become fascinating pieces. This morning, a bundle on the kitchen table contained cloth napkins in a napkin ring, a computer mouse and a pen wrapped carefully in a brown bag and bound with many, many multicolored rubber bands. I believe it was a simple way of organizing the objects on the table and kitchen counter, but it ended up being something unique."

"He doesn't always remember his own work," says Grace Sanchez, the Golden Gallery director who assembled the show. "He can talk about it as if it's someone else."

But on this winter day, Harry seems very present when he talks about his large, broad-brushed paintings covering the studio walls.

"I've done a lot of figure pieces within a certain style," he says. "They have motion and movement within the shape they're placed in. The work itself leads the way -- images, colors, scale. All of that is active."

Mardy's work hangs on walls next door, in an attached house they have rented to students from Oregon College of Art & Craft, where Mardy worked for 27 years and took classes.

"Harry taught me to see colors in new ways and to use patterns to define space. He has always abstracted natural forms to invent images and has taught me to be less representational and tight in my drawings and paintings."

Their joint show of 25 works will complement each other -- Harry's smaller works on paper, including collages and ink figures, and Mardy's warm yellows and bright blues and aquas.

"I start with what I see outside," she says. "Rocks, leaves. I start with plaster on board and paint over it and sand it. As I sand something, images emerge. It's kind of chronological. What I uncover, what I reveal, how much to reveal? I relate it to Harry's memory loss and what comes out. It's amazing what comes out -- some memory of some incident. The human mind has so much buried. He surprises me all the time."

Mardy and Harry still have good moments, she says. "The bad moments are forgotten just as fast as the good ones. There are times when in frustration, I get angry with him. An apology and a hug are all it takes to erase the bad moments."